Understanding the Oct. 2025 AWS Outage
From my experience in the cybersecurity world, I’ve seen that the digital foundations of modern business are often more fragile than they appear. The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20th, 2025, serves as a stark reminder of this reality. For roughly 15 hours, from 03:00 to 18:00 (EST), a significant portion of the internet effectively went dark, impacting thousands of businesses, from major enterprises to the smallest home-based operations. This event was not just a technical failure; it was a fundamental disruption to the core of countless businesses, and it holds critical lessons for us all.
A Cascade of Failures
The initial reports pointed to a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), which acts as the internet's phone book. To expand on that, DNS is the backbone of how we navigate the web. When you type a website like "google.com" into your browser, a request is sent to a DNS server to ask for the specific address of that site. Think of it like using a GPS: you enter a street address, and the GPS plots the exact location on a map. Similarly, DNS takes the website name you provide and returns the specific IP address, telling your computer exactly where to send its request. Without it, your browser wouldn’t know how to find any website.
This was followed by statements from AWS suggesting the issue was with their health monitoring system for network load balancers. However, the ultimate root cause was identified as a failure in Amazon's DynamoDB database service. In simple terms, DynamoDB is a massive data repository where information is stored and can be quickly retrieved. You can think of it like a vast Excel spreadsheet, organizing data into columns and rows. When this service failed, it meant that any application or service that needed to "look up" information from it could no longer function. This, in turn, caused a staggering 141 other AWS services to fail, paralyzing companies like Coinbase, Peloton, Signal, Lyft, and any business relying on AWS services in the affected regions.
This incident highlights a crucial vulnerability in the cloud-first model. While services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform offer incredible power and scalability, removing the need for on-premise servers and the associated security burdens, they also introduce a single point of failure. When these platforms go down, so does every business that depends on them.
The Disproportionate Impact on Small Businesses
While the outage was felt across the board, the impact on small businesses was particularly devastating. Large enterprises often have dedicated engineering teams that can attempt to execute cutovers or re-route traffic. They have the resources for immediate client outreach and damage control.
For a small business, however, this kind of event can be catastrophic. With support lines overwhelmed, these entrepreneurs were left in the dark, unable to get answers and watching their revenue disappear by the minute. It’s a terrifying position to be in, and it underscores the need for even the smallest businesses to think about resilience and redundancy.
Key Takeaways
Understand Your Dependencies: Do you know what services your business relies on? A full audit of your digital supply chain is essential.
Redundancy is Not a Luxury: While it may seem like an unnecessary expense, having a backup plan is critical. This could involve multi-cloud strategies or having critical data backed up in a separate environment. In line with the principles of NIST, a resilient architecture is a core component of risk management.
Develop an Incident Response Plan: What do you do when your services go offline? Who do you call? How do you communicate with your customers? An incident response plan is a key control within ISO 27001, which you can think of as the internationally accepted rulebook for how to implement and maintain information security. Having a plan like this is not just for large corporations.
Don't Assume Your Cloud Provider Has It Covered: While cloud providers offer a high level of security and reliability, they are not infallible. The ultimate responsibility for your business continuity lies with you.
